2014.10.03 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History and the Politics of Art, Columbia University Press, 2014, 274pp., $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780231152013.
Reviewed by Alison Ross, Monash University
In the closing pages of his ambitious new book, Gabriel Rockhill argues against the 'widespread consensus that the era of revolutionary politics and radical art -- if it ever truly existed -- is definitively behind us' (237). Rockhill maintains that the theoretical presuppositions of this 'end of illusions thesis' are shared by the standard, ontological approach to the topic of 'art and politics,' which attempts to specify their points of interrelation. Against the substantialist ontology that assumes that in the case of 'art' and 'politics' we are dealing with 'two separate entities', and then moves to articulate the features of art's form, content or effect that would relate it to or, in the case of the end of illusions thesis,. . .